.\" Copyright 1997 Derek B. Noonburg
.TH pdftotext 1 "14 Aug 2000"
.SH NAME
pdftotext \- Portable Document Format (PDF) to text converter
(version 0.91)
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B pdftotext
[options]
.RI [ PDF-file
.RI [ text-file ]]
.SH DESCRIPTION
.B Pdftotext
converts Portable Document Format (PDF) files to plain text.
.PP
Pdftotext reads the PDF file,
.IR PDF-file ,
and writes a text file,
.IR text-file .
If
.I text-file
is not specified, pdftotext converts
.I file.pdf
to
.IR file.txt .
If 
.I text-file
is \'-', the text is sent to stdout.
.SH OPTIONS
.TP
.BI \-f " number"
Specifies the first page to convert.
.TP
.BI \-l " number"
Specifies the last page to convert.
.TP
.B \-ascii7
Convert the text to 7-bit ASCII; the default is to use the 8-bit
ISO Latin-1 character set.
.TP
.B \-latin2
Convert the text to the Latin-2 (ISO-8859-2) character set.  (This
will only be useful if the font encodings are specified correctly in
the PDF file.)
.TP
.B \-latin5
Convert the text to the Latin-5 (ISO-8859-9) character set.  (This
will only be useful if the font encodings are specified correctly in
the PDF file.)
.TP
.B \-eucjp
Convert Japanese text to EUC-JP.  This is currently the only option
for converting Japanese text -- the only effect is to switch to 7-bit
ASCII for non-Japanese text, in order to fit into the EUC-JP encoding.
(This option is only available if pdftotext was compiled with Japanese
support.)
.TP
.B \-raw
Keep the text in content stream order.  This is a hack which often
"undoes" column formatting, etc.  This option will likely be replaced
with something more sophisticated when pdftotext is rewritten to use a
smarter text placement algorithm.
.TP
.BI \-upw " password"
Specify the user password for the PDF file.
.TP
.B \-q
Don't print any messages or errors.
.TP
.B \-v
Print copyright and version information.
.TP
.B \-h
Print usage information.
.RB ( \-help
is equivalent.)
.SH BUGS
Some PDF files contain fonts whose encodings have been mangled beyond
recognition.  There is no way (short of OCR) to extract text from
these files.
.SH AUTHOR
The pdftotext software and documentation are copyright 1996-2000
Derek B. Noonburg (derekn@foolabs.com).
.SH "SEE ALSO"
.BR xpdf (1),
.BR pdftops (1),
.BR pdfinfo (1),
.BR pdftopbm (1),
.BR pdfimages (1)
.br
.B http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/